Professional-quality photography, both digital and film, is commonly used by vendors of goods and/or services to create attractive marketing and advertising for such goods and/or services. Professional-quality photography is the result of a combination of professional equipment and professional talent and experience.
The professional equipment typically includes at least a high resolution digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras and one or more camera lens with multiple high-quality glass elements. Other equipment including lighting and reflective screens can also be used. This equipment is available to professional and amateur photographers alike, although the images that professional photographers take with the professional equipment are likely to differ greatly than the images that amateur photographers take with the same professional equipment. An inexperienced amateur photographer may fail to frame or align the imaged object properly or may fail to correctly set aperture, shutter speed, ISO, or other imaging controls of the camera properly. These and other factors under control of the camera operator greatly affect how the resulting photographs capture the imaged object, and more specifically, show off or otherwise accentuate the object's visual characteristics. The difference between stunning professional-quality images and generic amateur-level images, even when shot with the same equipment, can be the difference in selling the goods and services being photographed or at least generating the customer traffic for those goods.
Professional photographers have an “eye” for proper configuration of the camera settings and proper positioning of the object in the camera lens in order to produce the best shots of the object. However, professional photography is often too expensive for small vendors or vendors that have a sporadic need. Moreover, the time to produce the professional-quality photographs is too long for many vendors. For example, a vendor may obtain a new object. The vendor contacts the professional photographer who then comes onsite within a few days to set-up an ideal photo shoot and to take pictures of the object. The professional photographer then returns to an office to process, edit, or touch up (i.e., “photoshop”) the images before returning the final pictures to the vendor. This process could take several days and sometimes weeks to complete. During this time, the object is retained by the vendor with a lower likelihood of being sold because of the lack of advertising or marketing. This is especially problematic if the vendor requires fast turnaround of the objects and is constantly receiving new inventory. For example, a dealer of automobiles, and especially used automobiles, is dependent on quickly receiving professional-quality images of the automobiles in order to generate interest and accelerate the sale of those automobiles, which, in turn, frees room on the dealer lot for more inventory.
Accordingly, there is a need to enable amateurs within a business to competently, cost effectively, and efficiently take a series of professional-quality images of inventory, goods, objects, and services without the time, expense, and experience of professional photographers. More specifically, there is a need for an imaging apparatus that allows any apparatus operator (amateur or otherwise) to take professional-quality images of different objects by automatically providing the proper framing, zooming/scaling, and alignment for those objects and by optionally configuring the optimal camera settings and correcting visual characteristics of the resulting images in an autonomous manner without manual user input or manual user control.